The Suburban Guerrilla Is on a Roll

And boy is she shrill:

Suburban Guerrilla: DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO: Isn't it ironic? Don't ya think? President Bush's special envoy, James Baker, who has been trying to persuade the world to forgive Iraq's crushing debts, is simultaneously working for a commercial concern that is trying to recover money from Iraq, according to confidential documents. "Mr Baker's Carlyle Group is in a consortium secretly proposing to try to collect $27bn (£15bn) on behalf of Kuwait, one of Iraq's biggest creditors, by using high-level political influence. It claims Mr Baker will not benefit personally, but the consortium could make millions in fees, retainers and commission as a result..."

NEVER SAY NEVER: But but but... everyone said this couldn't happen: Germany might deploy troops in Iraq if conditions there change, Peter Struck, the German defence minister, indicated on Tuesday in a gesture that appears to provide backing for John Kerry, the US Democratic presidential challenger. In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Struck departed from his government’s resolve not to send troops to Iraq under any circumstances, saying: “At present I rule out the deployment of German troops in Iraq. In general, however, there is no one who can predict developments in Iraq in such a way that he could make a such a binding statement [about the future]...”<

HOORAY: Looks like Bush is giving up on Pennsylvania:... Bush has visited the Keystone State 39 times - more than any other state - but a White House source said he does not plan to return soon and Pennsylvania was not on a list of the President's top 10 advertising targets last month.

MAKE A STATEMENT: In case you're interested in doing something, here's the info for the Sinclair Broadcasting advertising boycott...

SIGNS AND OMENS
Here's news about the only poll that counts: the 7-Eleven coffee cup poll. "It's pretty simple," said Dean Hurrell, a field consultant for Virginia Beach area 7-11s. "The customer either grabs the Bush cup or the Kerry cup. There's a bar code on the side. Our employees scan it and nationally it registers at our Web site." The company tried this during the 2000 election and came within one percentage point of the official results. There are 83 stores in Virginia Beach and 250 across Hampton Roads. As of Monday morning, President Bush has a four-percent lead in the region.... There's good news for Kerry in the swing states so far.

DEMOCRACY, REPUBLICAN STYLE: They were tearing up Democratic registration forms in Oregon, too: Bradbury learned of the conduct from KGW-TV, which interviewed Mike Johnson, 20, a canvasser who said he was instructed to only accept Republican registration forms. He told the TV reporter that he "might" destroy forms turned in by Democrats. "I have never in my five years as secretary of state ever seen an allegation like the one that came up tonight — ever," Bradbury said. "I mean, frankly, it just totally offends me that someone would take someone else's registration and throw it out."

HMMM: Salon has more on the bulge. Wait until you see the latest picture...

FRAIDY CAT: How can you lead the country when you're such a big pussy, you're afraid of a buncha old people? "WASHINGTON -- President Bush and 25,000 AARP members will be in Las Vegas at the same time this week, but the Republican incumbent won't drop in on the organization that gave a boost to last year's Medicare prescription drug law.... The president had three previously scheduled events -- all re-election rallies, said campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel. One of those rallies will be in Las Vegas..."

WHO'S LEFT?: Republican and former Minnesota governor endorses John Kerry: "I am more fearful for the state of this nation than I have ever been..."

OH, THAT LIBRUL MEDIA: Via Kevin Drum, this piece on how Kerry is framed in the media from Jon Chait: "One of the curiosities of political journalism is that reporters tend to be assiduously even-handed about matters of policy (which can revolve around disputes over objective fact) but ruthlessly judgmental on questions of character (which are inherently subjective). In fact, most reporters don't know or care much about policy. They see politics primarily through the lens of the candidates' personal traits." Kevin comments: "Now, this is hardly an original observation — in fact, it's downright pedestrian to anyone who reads Somerby regularly — but Chait does a good job of teasing it out and explaining how an increasing fixation on "character" has made political life almost impossible for moderates from either party — but especially for Democrats..."

DEMOCRACY BEGINS AT HOME: ... "From Las Vegas: (Oct. 12) -- Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash. Anyone who has recently registered or re-registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store or even government building may be affected.... The focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America.... The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations..."

MIGHT I SUGGEST A NAP?: From Rolling Stone, yet more evidence that the national media is nothing more than a pack of sulky, overpaid children: "In late september, I spent a week on the Kerry plane.... Kerry had gotten a series of impassioned standing ovations during his speech. But when Elisabeth Bumiller described the event in the New York Times, she said, referring to a moment when Kerry spoke an entire paragraph in flawless Spanish, "Kerry's audience . . . listened in startled silence, then broke out into cheers and applause when he made his way through [the paragraph]."... in Orlando, where inside more than 7,500 people were screaming wildly as Kerry spoke, Candy Crowley stood next to the venue and reported on CNN that Kerry was "trying . . . to rev up the crowd." The implication was unmistakable: Kerry's supporters in Florida were resistant, even standoffish. Just to make sure Crowley was able to get away with downplaying the event as she was, CNN never showed a wide shot of the large, cheering crowd..."

WORSE AND WORSE: ... what Sy Hersh said last week at Berkeley:

I got a call last week from a soldier -- it's different now, a lot of communication, 800 numbers. He's an American officer and he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. It's a place where we claim we've done great work at cleaning out the insurgency. He was a platoon commander. First lieutenant, ROTC guy.

It was a call about this. He had been bivouacing outside of town with his platoon. It was near, it was an agricultural area, and there was a granary around. And the guys that owned the granary, the Iraqis that owned the granary... It was an area that the insurgency had some control, but it was very quiet, it was not Fallujah. It was a town that was off the mainstream. Not much violence there. And his guys, the guys that owned the granary, had hired, my guess is from his language, I wasn't explicit -- we're talking not more than three dozen, thirty or so guards. Any kind of work people were dying to do. So Iraqis were guarding the granary. His troops were bivouaced, they were stationed there, they got to know everybody...

They were a couple weeks together, they knew each other. So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he's hysterical. He's totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, "No, you don't understand. That's a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents."

You read those stories where the Americans, we take a city, we had a combat, a hundred and fifteen insurgents are killed. You read those stories. It's shades of Vietnam again, folks, body counts...

You know what I told him? I said, fella, I said: you've complained to the captain. He knows you think they committed murder. Your troops know their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Just shut up. Get through your tour and just shut up. You're going to get a bullet in the back. You don't need that. And that's where we are with this war.

Head South Dakota Republican Bill Janklow Is Shrill!

"Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Janklow R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!! Aaaaaaaaiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!"

Daily Kos :: Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.: Former SD governor [and congressman] Bill Janklow... the state's most prominent Republican... these words are huge: "The former governor and congressman says the national GOP is encouraging campaign workers to cheat. He says his ire is directed at the Republican Party's Victory operation, which helps register people and get them to the polls. Janklow says his problem with the organization goes back to 2002 when he was a candidate for the US House."

68 Health Finance Policy Experts Are Shrill

I remember many of these health policy experts when they were "fair and balanced." I remember many of them speaking fondly of George H. W. Bush and his plans for "risk adjusters" to balance out the private insurance market. But, alas! they too have been driven by the mendacity of the Bush administration into shrill unholy madness:

Health Care Finance Group: We are 68 people with more than a thousand years of combined professional and academic experience in health care finance and organization. As a group, we neither represent nor endorse a particular political party or viewpoint about health care reform.

We have reviewed the health care finance proposals put forward by Senator John Kerry. Their primary thrust is to make the federal government a reinsurer when a single insured individual incurs health care costs greater than $50,000 in the course of any one year.

Because high-cost individuals account for a large proportion of the total cost of health insurance, this reinsurance is intended to make private health insurance more affordable for both employers and individuals and thus reduce the number of uninsured individuals and families. This approach is fully consistent with maintaining a health care finance system largely run by private insurance, private employers, and private medical providers.

Although Senator Kerry's proposals should be subject to a full analysis of their cost and impact, any claim that they amount to "government run health care" or a "government takeover" of the health care system or of health care decision-making is simply inconsistent with the facts. We are not aware of any expert in health care or health care finance, whatever his or her political orientation, who believes otherwise.

We hope that many of them can be stabilized on an outpatient basis--hospitalization costs being what they are, especially for those who are hard to control because of the hysterical strength lent them through the eldritch practices of the Elder Shrill. But economists... security specialists... now health finance experts... We're going to have to raise some serious money here at Miskatonic to build another wing for the asylum.

Former Republican Congressman Bob Barr Gets Shrill

Jumin' Jehosaphat! Lifelong Repblican and former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr strikes a shrill note as he stares into the eyes of a party he no longer recognizes:

Voting for president used to be so easy, at least for a conservative. There was the Republican candidate. You knew he generally stood for lower taxes, less government spending, giving fewer powers to the government, lower deficits and a zealous regard for individual privacy.

Then, there was the Democrat. You knew he generally stood for higher taxes, more government and deficit spending, and a zealous regard for civil liberties.

Now we have the election of 2004. For the first time in my voting life, the choice in the race for president isn't so clear And, among true conservatives, I'm not alone.

He goes on to detail his issues with the Bush administration:

Instead, what we got were record levels of new spending, including nearly double-digit increases in nondefense discretionary spending. We now have deficits exceeding those that the first Republican-controlled Congress in 40 years faced when it convened in January 1995.

The oft-repeated mantra that "the terrorists made us spend more" rings hollow, especially to those who actually understand that increases in nondefense discretionary spending are not the inevitable result of fighting terrorists. It also irritates many conservatives, whether or not they support the war in Iraq, that so much of defense spending is being poured into the black hole of Iraq's internal security, while the security of our own borders goes wanting.

At the same time, here at home, many law-abiding citizens accurately perceive that their own freedoms and civil liberties are being stripped. They are being profiled by government computers whenever they want to travel, their bank accounts are being summarily closed because they may fit some "profile," they are under surveillance by cameras paid for by that borrowed federal money, and, if the administration has its way, they will be forced to carry a national identification card. That skewed sense of priorities really rankles conservatives.

But Barr saves his best for last:

Those are but three tips of the iceberg that signal the deep dissatisfaction many conservatives harbor against the president...Bush's problem is that true conservatives remember their history. They recall that in recent years when the nation enjoyed the fruits of actual conservative fiscal and security policies, a Democrat occupied the White House and Congress was controlled by a Republican majority that actually fought for a substantive conservative agenda.

History's a troublesome thing for presidents. Even though most voters don't take much of a historical perspective into the voting booth with them, true conservatives do.

Security Scholars for a Sensible Shrillness

Yet another large group of people with experience in a given field goes completely off the deep end and writes an open letter about the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, and simple disconnection from reality of George W. Bush and his administration:

The results of this policy have been overwhelmingly negative for U.S. interests. [6]   While the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime was desirable, the benefit to the U.S. was small as prewar inspections had already proven the extreme weakness of his WMD programs, and therefore the small size of the threat he posed. On the negative side, the excessive U.S. focus on Iraq led to weak and inadequate responses to the greater challenges posed by North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs, and diverted resources from the economic and diplomatic efforts needed to fight terrorism in its breeding grounds in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East. Worse, American actions in Iraq, including but not limited to the scandal of Abu Ghraib, have harmed the reputation of the U.S. in most parts of the Middle East and, according to polls, made Osama Bin Laden more popular in some countries than is President Bush. This increased popularity makes it easier for al-Qaida to raise money, attract recruits, and carry out its terrorist operations than would otherwise be the case.

The Discipline of Economics Joins the Order of the Shrill

It used to be that if you wanted to teach a parrot to be an economist, all you had to teach it was to answer every question with, "It's supply and demand! Supply and demand!" (If you wanted to teach it to be a finance economist so it could get a higher-paying job at a business school, it was even easier: "Arbitrage! Arbitrage!")

But now--after four years of the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, and simple disconnection from reality of George W. Bush and his administration--economists are singing a different tune. Instead of "Supply and Demand!" it is "Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Tax Cuts Entitlement Spending Phrma Steel Tariff R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!! Aaaaaaaaiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!"

Economist.com | The economy and the election: WOULD John Kerry or George Bush do a better job stewarding America's economy?.... Ask economics professors, however, and you get a clearer answer....In an informal poll of 100 academics, conducted by The Economist, Mr Bush's policies win low marks. More than 70% of the 56 professors who responded to our survey rate Mr Bush's first-term economic policies as bad or very bad. Fewer than 20% give positive marks to Mr Bush's second-term economic agenda, and almost six out of ten disapproved. Mr Kerry hardly got rave reviews either, but his economic plan still fared better than the president's did. In all, four out of ten professors rated Mr Kerry's economic plan as good or very good...

The New Donkey Is Shrill

He? Donkeys must be "he," mustn't they? He reads the Bush-Cheney 2004 webpage, and that's it for him: Aaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Bush Negative Stump Speech R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!! Aaaaaaaaiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!

NewDonkey.com: As I noted when the speech first went up on the BC04 web page, the speech is almost entirely a negative attack on Kerry, and almost entirely based on distortions of the challenger's record and unsupported name-calling. Bumiller notes that all the positive stuff about the administration's record has been dumped out of the speech, apparently at the insistence of Karl Rove. (A separate AP story observes that neither Karl Rove nor Karen Hughes can take a breath without calling Kerry a "liberal").

A front-page Pear and Toner piece in the Times on the new Medicare Rx drug benefit helps explain why Bush doesn't want to go into the final presidential debate all puffed up about his domestic record. It's clear by now that the discount drug card that was the first phase of the new initiative has been pretty much a bust so far; by and large seniors don't like it, and don't trust it. And remember: this was supposed to be the easy part of the initiative, the no-pain, first-course-dessert that would make everybody happy before the broccoli is served in 2006, when the full Medicare drug coverage, with its convoluted premium structure and ever-escalating costs, is implemented.

Rove, of course, would probably urge Bush to go negative even if he did have something positive to talk about. You may have heard about Josh Green's profile of Rove in the latest (subscription only) Atlantic Monthly. Green makes a very astute observation about Rove's history that may show why his faith in negative campaigning is so strong, and why it might be misplaced today. Most of Rove's past campaigns were in two states--Texas and Alabama--that were at the time loaded with conservative, ticket-splitting Democrats likely to swing Republican in an ideologically polarized election. In that atmosphere, relentlessly attacking a Democratic candidate as a godless liberal simultaneously served the GOP's base-moblization and swing voter strategies. But few battleground states today are anything like Texas and Alabama in the '80s and '90s. If Bush stays negative right on through to election day, he will (a) help Democrats with their own turnout strategy, and (b) quite possibly alienate swing voters who are already unhappy with the incumbent's record.

The other possible flaw in Rove's strategy is that he may be overestimating the willingness of both the news media and the public to swallow the poisonous distortions of Kerry's record and agenda that his candidate is so shamelessly spewing into the air waves.

As revealed by Drudge, The Note's Mark Halperin sent a memo to his ABC colleagues warning them not to simply report exchanges between the campaigns as morally equivalent, because: "The current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done." Josh Marshall notes that Fox News is already trying to Ratherize Halperin (an absurd characterization given The Note's unctuous treatment of BC04 throughout the campaign), and I'm sure other conservative media will follow. It will be interesting--not to mention important--to see if the rest of the political world will go along with the idea that the president's flat-out lies about Kerry's record should be treated as no more negative than Kerry's efforts to point out what's actually happening in Iraq...

Liz Cox Barrett of CJR Campaign Desk Is Shrill!

A malign fate exposes Liz Cox Barrett of CJR Campaign desk to the "fact-checking" of the New Yorker Times "newspaper's" "reporter" David Rosenbaum. In response she shrieks "aaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh New York Times Takes Another Dive for the Bush Administration R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!! Aaaaaaaaiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!" uncurls her tentacles, unfolds her bat wings, and sings her swan song as she joins the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill:

CJR Campaign Desk: Archives: Following Friday night's debate, Campaign Desk was struck by the stark differences between the "fact-checking" efforts of two major newspapers. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post on Saturday offered readers versions of long-overdue pieces truth-squadding candidates' claims. The Times once again assigned the task to David E. Rosenbaum alone, who weighed in with a piece cautiously headlined, "Different Interpretations on War, Jobs and Health."... Just as the waffling headline promises, the Times' Rosenbaum took readers on a toothless tour of differing "interpretations," arranging his story into eight topic-based subheadings (Jobs, Taxes and Budget, etc.), presenting Bush's "interpretation, Kerry "interpretation," and "the facts," and then leaving it to readers to discern which "interpretation" better jibed with "the facts." One example of how the Times left readers hanging: Rosenbaum took the time to recount what each candidate said "in a squabble over whether Mr. Kerry's tax plan would hurt small businesses" (including Bush's "Need some wood?" comment), but never addressed whether Mr. Kerry's tax plan would hurt small businesses. (Turns out, as Kessler et al. make clear in the Post, this Bush claim -- specifically that Kerry's plan would raise taxes on 900,000 small businesses -- is "misleading" in that Bush is defining "small business" in such a way that "every partner at a huge accounting firm or at the largest law firm would represent a small business.")...

Cuban-Americans Get Shrill

It is common wisdom that Cuban-Americans will support the current administration. In shrill terms, Fernando A. Amandi explains his defection:

I am a 55-year-old Cuban-American and Fortune 100 senior executive. I came to this country 44 years ago as an 11-year-old. My parents sent me here to preserve my freedom and protect me from the totalitarian darkness enveloping Cuba. I will forever be grateful for their courage in sending me away, and for the values they instilled in me -- values of family, God and country, which have guided me and filled me with pride as I traveled all around the world as an American citizen.

For the last 30 years I have been a registered Republican and felt at ease with fiscal conservatism, a less intrusive government, a strong military, the confidence that anything was possible in America and that we were indeed the beacon of freedom for all the world to see. I felt strongly that in this administration I would finally see the end of Castro's reign of terror and a constructive outreach to the Latin American nations plagued with poverty.

I voted for George W. Bush in 2000 with all of these expectations in mind, in addition to addressing the deteriorating quality of life in the U.S. in terms of creating quality jobs, improving education, health care, urban infrastructure and ecological improvements to our delicate environment.

When the 9-11 attack took place, I strongly supported President Bush in defending our homeland by going after the terrorists in Afghanistan. As a result, I understood the president's singular focus in making us safe at home. The world was united with us on the war on terror.

But then came Iraq and our pre-emptive invasion on the grounds of a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. Ever since, and in light of the revelations that have now surfaced, the situation is not what we were led to believe -- much to our detriment.

After cataloging his issues with Bush, he continues:

Here is the bottom line on this administration's government: I do not feel that we have made progress in the past four years. We don't feel safer, we have lost respect in many nations around the world, our jobless economic recovery fails the common sense test, the fiscal deficit has exploded, millions are without health benefits, the war on terror seems endless, with a high human and economic price, our children will be burdened with debts for years to come, Castro stays in power and Latin America pleads for a brighter future in vain.

Will you be the next conservative to hold your convictions over party identification? The brothers and sisters of The Order welcome you.

Brig. Gen. Oscar B. Hilman, Sgt. Maj. Robert Barr, Lt. Col. Harry Gonzalez, Maj. Richard W. Spiegel, and Brig. Gen. James E. Chambers Are Shrill

Brig. Gen. Oscar B. Hilman, Sgt. Maj. Robert Barr, Lt. Col. Harry Gonzalez, Maj. Richard W. Spiegel, and Brig. Gen. James E. Chambers--why do these military offices hate America so much as to contradict Fearless Leader's declaration that the commanders in the field believe they have enough troops?

Atrios, shrill before the Order of the Shrill was even a glint in the eye of the Mighty Ones, modems in to write:

Eschaton: Wow. Bush has been blaming the military for his policy decisions. And, he's been lying about it. I'm just shocked, really I am. First we have a Vice President who lies to us and now the President too? What is this country coming to? What will we tell the children?

Since May, Brig. Gen. Oscar B. Hilman, commander of the 81st Brigade Combat Team, a National Guard unit from Washington state that operates the base, has requested 500 to 700 more soldiers. But he said the request has been denied.

"Because the enemy is persistent, we need additional forces. We asked twice," said Hilman, who arrived here in April for a yearlong stint. But Hilman said he was told that "there are no additional forces," and that U.S. soldiers are needed elsewhere, particularly to battle insurgents and cover a large area to the north that includes the rebellious cities of Tikrit and Samarra.

The 81st Brigade's top enlisted man, Sgt. Maj. Robert Barr, said the soldiers here are frustrated, and that he often hears the same question: "Why aren't we stopping it or killing their guys who are doing it?"

Their complaints contrast sharply with statements by President Bush and top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who say U.S. troop strength is sufficient but that more soldiers will be sent if senior commanders ask.

While the 81st provides security inside the fence that surrounds the base, the task of protection outside the concertina wire falls to the 2nd Brigade, part of the 1st Infantry Division, based in Tikrit. During the past week, the division has participated in the effort to take back Samarra from insurgents. Those units, too, are stretched thin.

"They have other operational concerns," said Lt. Col. Harry Gonzalez, a spokesman for the 81st. "There's a lot of real estate."

Hilman said he requested additional forces in the spring and again in the summer from 13th Corps Support Command, which is responsible for LSA Anaconda and all other multinational supply and transportation facilities in Iraq.

Maj. Richard W. Spiegel, a spokesman for the 13th Corps, confirmed that Hilman put in the request and that it was endorsed by the command's top officer, Brig. Gen. James E. Chambers.

The request was forwarded to Multi-National Corps Iraq headquarters, which assesses troop requirements and makes the final decision, Spiegel said. The request was denied, he said, declining to provide details.

Godspeed, Christopher Reeve

I hope our fair readers and the elders of The Order will permit me this grave indiscretion, but I am moved with great sadness to learn of the passing of Christoper Reeve at age 52. While his advocacy of stem cell research could have been sometimes described as shrill, he was in every sense an inspiration to all those who struggle with personal challenges both large and small. On the screen he played characters with super-human abilities, but in life his determination and sheer willpower made him far stronger than any fictional hero. And so today I wish only that as he leaves his broken body behind that he somehow finds the full measure of peace--and that because of him we recall that our struggle is the very essence of what makes us who we are.

Andrew Sullivan Is Still Shrill

And his shrill screeds of malevolent Bush-hatred still echo through the night:

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish:His distortion of Kerry's healthcare plan didn't flirt with being mendacious; it was an outright lie.... That he has to concede the complete absence of WMDs in Iraq is inevitably brutal on him and his argument about the war. The facts are simply against him, and it shows. He had absolutely no answer on his spending spree. None. If you're a one-issue voter on fiscal responsiblity, Kerry is obviously your man; and this debate rammed that point home. And then there were some simply bizarre moments. Does anyone in America ever use the term "internets"? Plural? I've never heard anyone in my life use this formulation. The mandatory malapropism: Bush promised at one point that he'd be more "facile" in future. That's going to be a hard promise to keep. After four years of defending the homeland, the president should also not be giving soundbites like "I'm worried. I'm worried about our country." Hey, Mr president. Join the gang.... And then there was the inevitable "mistakes" question. Bush didn't answer it - except to say he wish he hadn't hired Paul O'Neill. You'd think by now he'd have some kind of answer. But he seems to think he is incapable of error...

USCRC, Shrill?

If you ask us, it sounds as if the Civil Rights Commission is tabling dealing with a report on the administration's civil rights record in order to avoid the appearence of shrillness:

The report says Mr. Bush 'has neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that matched his words' on the subject. It finds fault with Mr. Bush's funding requests for civil rights enforcement; his positions on voting rights, educational opportunity and affirmative action; and his actions against hate crimes.

Former Right-Wing Republican Congressman Bob Barr Is Shrill

Shrill unholy madness takes another one:

Creative Loafing Atlanta | NEWS & VIEWS | AN AGONIZING CHOICE : When Bush became president Jan. 20, 2001, he inherited an enviable fiscal situation.... [A]nnual deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars had been transformed to a series of real and projected surpluses. The heavy lifting had been done. All Bush had to do was resist the urge to spend, and he had to exert some pressure on Congress to resist its natural impulses to do the same. Had he done that, he might have gone down in history as the most fiscally conservative president in modern times. Instead, what we got were record levels of new spending, including nearly double-digit increases in nondefense discretionary spending.... The oft-repeated mantra that "the terrorists made us spend more" rings hollow, especially to those who actually understand that increases in nondefense discretionary spending are not the inevitable result of fighting terrorists....

At the same time, here at home, many law-abiding citizens accurately perceive that their own freedoms and civil liberties are being stripped. They are being profiled by government computers whenever they want to travel, their bank accounts are being summarily closed because they may fit some "profile," they are under surveillance by cameras paid for by that borrowed federal money....

But the race appears to be tightening again. It's likely to remain tight until Election Day. Those dissatisfied conservative voters will become increasingly important, but it's going to be impossible for the president to pull them back in with hollow, last-minute promises.

Bush's problem is that true conservatives remember their history. They recall that in recent years when the nation enjoyed the fruits of actual conservative fiscal and security policies, a Democrat occupied the White House and Congress was controlled by a Republican majority that actually fought for a substantive conservative agenda.

History's a troublesome thing for presidents. Even though most voters don't take much of a historical perspective into the voting booth with them, true conservatives do.

Hmmm. Who's the Libertarian candidate again?

Homecoming Day Here at Miskatonic University!

It is homecoming day here at Miskatonic University in beautiful Arkham, Massachusetts. The blue skies! The brilliant colors of the fall leaves! The crisp fall air! The exploits of our football team, the Slimy Cephalopods! The furious arguments with the referees over just how many aeons of eligibility a semi-sentient servitor beast has anyway! The tentacled horrors lurking in the river! The distortions of dimensional geometry that the human eye rebels against and that could drive the human mind... mad... that is, if the human mind had not already been driven mad by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, and disconnection from reality of George W. Bush and his administration...

Today at halftime, while our coach tried to think up a way to defend effectively when our opponents, the Alien Space Bats from R'lin-K'renn-A'a, had control of the ball, the Grand Heresiarch himself recognized one of the earliest members of the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill: one of the first to see things Humans Were Not Meant to Know: John DiIulio. Let me copy out his citation here:

John DiIulio, formerly Special Assistant to George W. Bush, we are proud to recognize your early membership in the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill. Your descent into shrill unholy madness was complete by the time you wrote the famous Letter to Ron Suskind, in which you stated: "...on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking.... Mayberry Machiavellis-staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible... on the so-called faith bill, they basically rejected any idea that the president's best political interests-not to mention the best policy for the country-could be served by letting centrist Senate Democrats in on the issue.... As one senior staff member chided me at a meeting at which many junior staff were present and all ears, "John, get a faith bill, any faith bill." Like college students who fall for the colorful, opinionated, but intellectually third-rate professor, you could see these 20- and 30-something junior White House staff falling for the Mayberry Machiavellis..." In your Letter to Ron Suskind, you reached heights of shrill unholy madness rarely equalled. We are proud to recognize the priority of your membership in our order!

Unfortunately, this citation was never awarded. As the ceremony started Professor DiIulio--as a result of a shocking fit of inattention on the part of his escorts--burst his bonds. Giving shrill cries, he loped off on all fours into the woods. Thereafter he eluded recovery, although his shrill keening screeds of Bush hatred were audible across the whole county. Only a few phrases were intelligible: "Medicare, not Medicaid!" "Get a bill, any bill!" and, of course, aaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh DiIulio R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!! Aaaaaaaaiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!

Another Eternal Lie from the Bush Administration...

Greater Shoggoth Mark Kleiman reports on the latest doings of the Shameless Ones:

Mark A. R. Kleiman: So much for tort reform: Kerry hits Bush on the vaccine shortage. Bush's spokesman responds with a falsehood: "Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt called Kerry's criticism 'baseless and hypocritical. So few companies make flu vaccines because of a broken medical liability system that Kerry falsely claims to want to fix but has voted 10 times against reforming.'"

But flu vaccines are already covered by the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, incorporating the damage caps and other "tort reform" measures that are supposed to be a panacea for the U.S. health care system.

They really do lie about absolutely everything, don't they? It's enough to drive someone Aaii! Aaii! Yog-Sothoth! Y'ai 'ng'nagh! Vaccine Injury Compensation Program H'ee--L'geb F'ai throdog uaaah!

Submitted Without Interpretation

I've been going through the mail today, and I've noticed that it mostly falls into two categories:

• Mail about weakly described and not particularly credible schemes for eliminating my personal debt, somehow involving the son of the former head of state of a third world country.
• Mail about weakly described and not particularly credible schemes for elminating half the national debt, somehow involving the son of the former head of state of the United States of America.

We report. You decide.

Kevin Drum and the Cato Institute Together Ascend to Higher Degrees of Shrillness!!

Kevin Drum notes one of Bush's many, many lies from last night. This, however, is an especially powerful one. When exposed to this lie under laboratory conditions, thirty-seven staff members of the Cato Institute found themselves driven into shrill unholy madness. Many of them will never be able to appear on Fox News again. But we will give them a home, and honor them as Lesser Shoggoths in the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill:

The Washington Monthly: THE BIG LIE....I know that budget numbers are b-o-o-o-o-ring, but did anyone notice Bush repeating one of his great whoppers of all time last night?

Non-homeland, non-defense discretionary spending was raising at 15 percent a year when I got into office. And today it's less than 1 percent, because we're working together to try to bring this deficit under control.

The folks at Cato probably burst a collective vein last night when they heard this. (You can see what they think of Bush's spending record here.)

Here's the truth about non-defense discretionary spending over the past six administrations:

• Nixon/Ford: 6.8% per year

• Carter: 2.0% per year

• Reagan: -1.3% per year

• Bush 1: 4.0% per year

• Clinton: 2.5% per year

• Bush Jr: 8.2% per year

All percentages are adjusted for inflation. The chart on the right shows raw figures for the past three administrations (from the Congressional Budget Office).

Outside of the personal fantasyland Bush seems to inhabit, the truth is simple: spending of all kinds has skyrocketed under his administration and the Republican Congress. They've increased spending twice as fast as Clinton, three times as fast as Bush 1, and four times as fast as Carter. And remember: this doesn't include defense spending, entitlement spending, or homeland security. 9/11 and Medicare have nothing to do with it.

It's laughable for Bush to pretend to be a frugal spender, working his tail off to bring an out-of-control Clinton budget down to earth. He's spending our children's money as fast as he can print it, and debate fact checkers shouldn't let him get away with pretending otherwise.

Aaii! Aaii! Yog-Sothoth! Y'ai 'ng'nagh! Discretionary Federal Spending H'ee--L'geb F'ai throdog uaaah! Ogthrod Ai'f geb'l--ee'h Discreationary Federal Spending 'Ngah'ng Ai'y Zhro!!!!

Cheney Claims Saddam Has Ties to Rumsfeld!

Michael Berube learns things Humans Were Not Meant to Know about the triangle Saddam Hussein-Donald Rumsfeld-Richard Cheney, and falls ever deeper into shrill unholy madness:

The American Street » Cheney Claims Saddam Had Ties to Rumsfeld: When asked about the discrepancy, Vice President Cheney suggested that Saddam might have had close ties to Rumsfeld.

“There was a connection,” Cheney said. “A relationship, if you will. We know that Saddam tried to purchase weapons of mass destruction from some of the world’s most notorious and unscrupulous arms dealers, and we know that he managed to get his hands on those weapons at some point in the 1980s.”

Cheney referenced recently-released intelligence memos that hinted at a possible Rumsfeld-Saddam meeting, either in Prague or in Baghdad.... Skeptics immediately questioned the authenticity of the document, pointing out that Tariq Aziz rarely called Secretary Rumsfeld “Don” and that it would have been unlikely, in 1985, for Aziz to have written a note on New Republic letterhead.... The Vice President’s office countered by citing Rumsfeld’s own report of his meeting with Tariq Aziz, but again, skeptics challenged the report, claiming that Rumsfeld preferred to use Bernhard Fashion as his default font for communiques in the 1980s.

Cheney’s remarks seemed to be aimed not only at critics of the war in Iraq but at Secretary Rumsfeld himself, possibly for Rumsfeld’s statement on Monday that he knew of no “strong, hard evidence” linking Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda, followed by his remark on Tuesday, “I have acknowledged since September 2002 that there were ties between al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Political analysts are uncertain whether Cheney, in tying Saddam to Rumsfeld, has “turned the corner” and will now begin telling the truth for the first time in his sorry, blighted life, or whether, as one observer suggested, “he’s just trying to confuse the hell out of us.” “Honestly,” said the observer, “the bullshit upon bullshit upon bullshit has been piled on so thick by now I don’t think there’s any goddamn way of keeping track of it all.”

"Z.R."of CJR Campaign Desk Is Shrill

The lies that Howard Fineman tells as he tries to achieve "balance" and placate the minions of Yog-Sothoth who have spilled out from the transdimensional rift beneath Lafayette Park--these have driven one "Z.R." into shrill unholy madness:

CJR Campaign Desk: Archives:Consider this passage from Howard Fineman's latest online dispatch for Newsweek on the current state of the campaign:

This campaign so far has been almost exclusively, increasingly, about the war in Iraq. On one level, John Kerry's "position" is a contradictory bundle of confusion. He says the war was a mistake, but he's the guy calling for a gung-ho strategy in Fallujah to root out terrorist nests.

In exactly what world is it contradictory to say that the war was a mistake and the occupation a mess, but now that we're in that mess we have to carry on and make it right? Is that idea too subtle for Fineman to grasp?

We suspect that what's really going on here is that Fineman knows his column will not make the Bush campaign happy; its main premise is that that the campaign in its final weeks has boiled down to "the president desperately trying to tear down Kerry as the news tears down the president." So Fineman feels compelled to throw in some jabs at Kerry in search of "balance."

The answer to Z.R. is obvious. Not in this world, but in the world beyond the Gate that is opening in doomed R'lyeh--in that world it is a contradiction to say that the occupation is a mess and that we have to fix it and make it right.

Mark A. R. Kleiman Brings More Evidence to the Table

Some have taken the mysterious references in the Krugmanomicon to the "strange aeons" and the "eternal lies" to be evidence that Dick Cheney is an avatar of the indescribable Yog-Sothoth. Mark Kleiman brings forth more evidence on this score:

Mark A. R. Kleiman: Cheney's fuzzy coalition math: Remember Dick Cheney's bland denial that the Gulf War coalition was stronger than the coalition for the current war in Iraq?

No, you probably don't, since neither Sen. Edwards nor anyone else bothered to call him on it.

Well, here's what he said:"You made the comment that the Gulf War coalition in '91 was far stronger than this. No. We had 34 countries then; we've got 30 today. We've got troops beside us."


Fred Kaplan supplies the actual numbers, from official U.S. government sources: Gulf war: 800,000 non-U.S. troops. Iraq war: 24,000 non-U.S. troops.

So, according to the Vice President, a military force of 800,000 is not "far stronger" than a military force of 24,000.

And he got away with it. That's the scary thing.

Mark Kleiman is doomed. He fails to understand that in BushMath beyond the transdimensional rift ripped in the fabric of spacetime, 24,000 who follow George W. Bush are indeed greater than 800,000 who follow George H. W. Bush. He will never regain his sanity, and he will spend next semester teaching not at blustery UCLA but at Miskatonic University in balmy Arkham, Massachusetts.

Business School Professors Are Shrill!

Senior Tentacled Horror (Third Class) Avedon Carol modems in to reveal that America's business school professors are now shrill!

The Sideshow October 2004 Archive: Business school professors become shrill!

The Duelfer Report Is Shrill!

The Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraqi WMDs is shrill:

Here's What's Left: A terrible day for Bush/Cheney '04 -- Cheney lies and no WMD: Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.[...]

While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad’s desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.[...]

With the economy at rock bottom in late 1995, ISG judges that Baghdad abandoned its existing B[iological] W[eapons] program in the belief that it constituted a potential embarrassment, whose discovery would undercut Baghdad’s ability to reach its overarching goal of obtaining relief from UN sanctions.

In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain
advanced BW weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specifi c work for military purposes. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the Presidential level.[...]

Yet Another Paradoxical Addition To The Order...

We here at The Order believe that privacy and anonymity are inalienable rights to all sentient beings who have become uncontrollably shrill. So far be it from us to identify members who, for the sake of their current positions in government, wish to remain nameless as they wrestle with their unholy madness. Here is one such poor soul, Mr. X, who recently discussed the situation in Iraq:

"As soon as the sanctions were lifted, [Saddam Hussein] had every intention of going back" to his weapons program, [Mr. X.] said "...the sanctions regime was coming apart at the seams. Saddam perverted that whole thing and generated billions of dollars."

Unfortunately for the sanity of Mr. X, the company he ran in 2000 was one of the major accomplices in providing the funding for these as-of-yet-begun weapons of mass destruction program related activities:

Millions of dollars of US oil business with Iraq are being channelled discreetly through European and other companies, in a practice that has highlighted the double standards now dominating relations between Baghdad and Washington after a decade of crippling sanctions.

Though legal, leading US oil service companies such as Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger, Flowserve, Fisher-Rosemount and others, have used subsidiaries and joint venture companies for this lucrative business, so as to avoid straining relations with Washington and jeopardising their ties with President Saddam Hussein's government in Baghdad.

Halliburton, the largest US oil services company, is among a significant number of US companies that have sold oil industry equipment to Iraq since the UN relaxed sanctions two years ago [in 1998].

We here at The Order of course sympathize with Mr. X. If only his identity were known we could offer him a public brotherly welcome to the ranks of the shrill.

Howard Fineman Is Shrill

After four years of bending over so far backwards to be kind to George W. Bush that outside observers questioned whether any animal with a backbone could possibly assume such positions, Howard Fineman has finally broken. The newly-shrill Iraq Proconsul L. Paul Bremer has whispered in his ear--some message about the strange aeons and enternal lies of the Bush administration; of the eternal trans-dimensional struggle of The Medium Lobster with Yog-Sothoth, the Keymaster, of whom Cheney is but an avatar; and of Bush administration policy in Iraq. In response, Fineman has descended into shrill unholy madness and is One of Us now:

MSNBC - Bush is beginningto sound desperate: George Bush's real political enemy now isn't so much John Kerry as it is the flow of the news.... As things now stand, Bush is left with only one argument and justification for having launched a war that has cost 1,000 lives, $150 billion and whatever goodwill America had won in the aftermath of 9/11. His last-resort reason: Saddam Hussein might have developed weapons that he might have given to terrorists that might attack the United States. And even that reasoning is undermined by the new report of the Iraq Survey Group, which says that Saddam's capacities, whatever they might have been, were withering, not "gathering," under the weight of inspections.

We now know to a relative certainty that there were no WMD, no relationship with al-Qaida to speak of, no close ties to other major terrorists, and that, in the view of Paul Bremer — Bush's own man in Baghdad and a fellow Yalie — the Bush administration pretty much botched the occupation...

Hal Crowther is Sshrill

Andrew Northrup, ex-Grand Heresiarch of the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill, now merely High Priest of the Blind God Azathoth, modems in through a trans-dimensional rift to say: ""Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Hal Crowther R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!! Aaaaaaaaiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!":

The Poor Man: Hal Crowther is Sshrill: Hal Crowther is sshrill. The extra 's' stands for extra shrillness:

I struggle against the suspicion that so many of my fellow Americans are conceptually challenged. I want to reason with my neighbors, I want to engage these lost Americans. What makes you angry, neighbor? What arouses your suspicions? Does it bother you that this administration made terrorism a low priority, dismissed key intelligence that might have prevented the 9-11 catastrophe, then exploited it to justify the pre-planned destruction of Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with al Qaeda? All this is no longer conjecture, but direct reportage from cabinet-level meetings by the turncoat insiders Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill. ...

All it takes to make a Bush conservative is a few slogans from talk radio and pickup truck bumpers, a sneer at "liberals" and maybe a name-dropping nod to Edmund Burke or John Locke, whom most of them have never read. Sheep and sheep only could be herded by a ludicrous but not harmless cretin like Rush Limbaugh, who has just compared the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners to "a college fraternity prank" (and who once called Chelsea Clinton "the family dog"--you don't have to worry about shame when you have no brain).


I don't think it's accurate to describe America as polarized between Democrats and Republicans, or between liberals and conservatives. It's polarized between the people who believe George Bush and the people who do not. Thanks to some contested ballots in a state governed by the president's brother, a once-proud country has been delivered into the hands of liars, thugs, bullies, fanatics and thieves. The world pities or despises us, even as it fears us. What this election will test is the power of money and media to fool us, to obscure the truth and alter the obvious, to hide a great crime against the public trust under a blood-soaked flag. The most lavishly funded, most cynical, most sophisticated political campaign in human history will be out trolling for fools. I pray to God it doesn't catch you.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies Is Shrill!

Greater Shoggoth Matthew Yglesias modems in from The Shaw to report on a massive addition to the strength of the Fourth Shrill, Unholy, and Mad Think Tank Detachment:

TAPPED: October 2004 Archives: The good people at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (a formerly conservative think tank driven ever-closer toward shrillness by Bushian mismanagement) Postconflict Reconstruction Project have a new analysis (PDF) out on where Iraqi reconstruction money goes and why so little of it seems to reach Iraqi hands. Congress has appropriated $18.4 billion in reconstruction money, of which about 95 percent is just sitting around unspent. Of the remaining $1 billion that actually has been spent, 30 percent goes to security, 15 percent to "corruption/fraud/mismanagement," 12 percent to "other" costs, 10 percent to CPA and U.S. embassy overhead, and 6 percent to profit for subcontractors. A mere 27 percent -- $270 million out of an $18.4 billion appropriation -- actually gets into Iraqi hands. And for some reason the whole "hearts and minds" thing isn't going so well. It's hard to imagine why.

Paul Bremer Wants You To Know He Isn't Shrill

L. Paul Bremer wants you to know he isn't a member of the order. He wants you to know it so much that he's placed an op-ed for the New York Times discussing his lack of shrillness. Next week tune in to find out who actually wrote the piece.

Tim Ryan Is Mad As Hell And He's Not Going To Take it Any MoreShrill

Representative Tim Ryan breaks it down, or possibly breaks down, on the floor of the House. (requires Windows Media Player)

They Report, We Run And Hide

Back in the early days of this blog, when I had just joined the order and knew even less about its inner mysteries than I do now, I'd occasionally be a party to Brad wandering the virtual halls of the online office shrieking in some alien dialect I neither could nor wanted to understand.

"Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii"

My research into this matter accomplished nothing but frightening some male cats. I finally did what I sometimes did when the question makes no sense -- not in the form of an unknowable answer, but in the form of a fundamentally decapitated query. I consulted the staff of Fafblog. Today, the Medium Lobster answers:

For Dick Cheney is no follower of Cthulhu; rather, he is an avatar of mighty and monstrous Yog-Sothoth, the key and guardian of the gate, the All-in-One of limitless being and self whose vile and indomitable essense stretches beyond the expanse of time and space and can only be perceived by mortals in brief glimpses: a form of The Cheney there, a shape of Yog-Delay there, a brief glimmer of NyarlaHastert there. There is not one Cheney, my friend, but a hundred, a thousand, a million - each a monstrous roiling outstretched tentacle reaching from the blackened abyss of the Outer Gods.

As is often whispered in alleys and written in the ancient and cursed texts of madmen, read the whole thing.

Howard Fineman Is One Of Us

Newsweek's Chief Political Correspondent and MSNBC contributor Howard Fineman had his application to the order accepted today, as the journalist notes:

As things now stand, Bush is left with only one argument and justification for having launched a war that has cost 1,000 lives, $150 billion and whatever goodwill America had won in the aftermath of 9/11. His last-resort reason: Saddam Hussein might have developed weapons that he might have given to terrorists that might attack the United States. (Emphasis Fineman.) And even that reasoning is undermined by the new report of the Iraq Survey Group, which says that Saddam's capacities, whatever they might have been, were withering, not "gathering," under the weight of inspections.

We now know to a relative certainty that there were no WMD, no relationship with al-Qaida to speak of, no close ties to other major terrorists, and that, in the view of Paul Bremer — Bush's own man in Baghdad and a fellow Yalie — the Bush administration pretty much botched the occupation.

As John Stewart of The Daily Show noted, the facts themselves seem to have a severe partisan slant. Look for the facts to join The Order in a special induction ceremony as the election draws nigh.

CORRECTION: B-School Profs Are Totally Shrill

We wish to apologize for and hereby retract our earlier statement in which asserted that no business school professors are shrill. In reality, at least one is. OK, more than one. OK, like over 100 from b-schools nobody has ever heard of like "Harvard", "MIT", "Stanford", "University of Texas at Austin", and "UCLA". It's a vast left-wing shrillness conspiracy:

In fact, if transfers from the Social Security trust fund are excluded, the federal deficit is even worse – well in excess of a half a trillion dollars this year alone. Although some members of your administration have suggested that the mountain of new debt accumulated on your watch is mainly the consequence of 9-11 and the war on terror, budget experts know that this is simply false. Your economic policies have played a significant role in driving this fiscal collapse. And the economic proposals you have suggested for a potential second term – from diverting Social Security contributions into private accounts to making the recent tax cuts permanent – only promise to exacerbate the crisis by further narrowing the federal revenue base.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Half The Known Freaking Universe R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. Iä! Shub-Krugman!

No Business School Profs Are Shrill

Business school professors, unlike economics professors, are not shrill. We won't be posting any liberal socialist b-school shrillness here.

Authoritative Debunking Of War Justification Is Arming the Shrill

Clearly Charles A. Duelfer and his team of investigators did not receive the Karl Rove talking points prior to the release of their damning report that poses some substantial problems for Bush et. al.:

Iraq now appears to have destroyed its stockpiles of illicit weapons within months of the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and by the time of the American invasion in spring 2003, its capacity to produce such weapons was continuing to erode, the top American inspector in Iraq said in a report made public today.

The report by Charles A. Duelfer said the last Iraqi factory capable of producing militarily significant quantities of unconventional weapons was destroyed in 1996. The finding amounted to the starkest portrayal yet of a vast gap between the Bush administration's prewar assertions about Iraqi weapons and what a 15-month postinvasion inquiry by American investigators has concluded were the facts on the ground.

At the time of the American invasion, Mr. Duelfer concluded, Iraq had not possessed military-scale stockpiles of illicit weapons for a dozen years and was not actively seeking to produce them.

"Over time he was getting further away from nuclear weapons," an official familiar with the report said of Saddam Hussein in advance of the public release of Mr. Duelfer's report. "He was further away in 2003 than he was in 1991. The nuclear program was decaying rather than being preserved."

What poor wretched souls will be driven to shrill madness by this latest revelation of mendacity on the part of the Bush team? If aluminum-tube-gate is any indication, the toll on the recently sane will be devastating. The Order sends our deepest condolences and our most amiable welcome.

Andrew Sulivan Is Still Shrill

The shrill screeds of Andrew Sullivan's irrational Cheney-hatred echo off the sinister cliffs...

On all the critical questions in this election - why is Osama bin Laden still at large? why did we invade Iraq? why has the Iraq occupation come unglued? why the poor jobs record? why the record deficits? - Cheney had almost no answer at all.

Federal Judge Gets Shrill on PATRIOT Act

In dismissing significant portions of the Orwell-inspired PATRIOT Act, Federal Judge Victor Marrero gets shrill on intimidation of the American public:

In his ruling, the judge called national security of "paramount value" and said the government "must be empowered to respond promptly and effectively" to threats. But he called personal security equal in importance and "especially prized in our system of justice."

He noted that the Supreme Court recently said that a "state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."

But Marrero said most ordinary citizens would be scared into compliance by a letter "framed in imposing language on FBI letterhead" accompanied by a stern warning to keep the government's demand secret.

"Objectively viewed, it is improbable that an FBI summons ... phrased in tones sounding virtually as biblical commandment, would not be perceived with some apprehension by an ordinary person and therefore elicit passive obedience," Marrero wrote.

It is a surprise to this author that biblical-style language could find its way into a document supported by the centrist leadership of the Justice Department. Clearly, this judge is unbalanced, shrill, and almost definitely a sinner destined to burn in hell.

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

My friend Bryan's two year old son is shrill. (requires QuickTime)

Alan Murray Joins the Shrill

Finally, the Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray joins the shrill:

WSJ.com - Political Capital: More than anyone else in this administration, [Cheney] provided questionable information about both the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the likely consequences of war with Iraq. In each case, he spoke with great conviction, as a man who had examined the evidence himself, and who wasn't just passing along the administration's line....

[T]he vice president appeared on "Meet the Press"... to assure Americans that U.S. troops would be "greeted as liberators."...

Mr. Cheney confidently dismissed... Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, who said it would take several hundred thousand troops in Iraq for several years to maintain stability. "I disagree," the vice president said without equivocation. "That's an overstatement."...

Mr. Cheney... said the administration knows "with absolute certainty" that Mr. Hussein "is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon."... aluminum tubes...

[W]hat we don't know -- and what I'd like to know -- is why they turned out to be wrong. Was the vice president misled by those who briefed him? Did he make an error in judgment when evaluating the available evidence? Or did he exaggerate the case in order to build public support for the war? That is no small matter. The Bush crowd, we know, isn't big on mea culpas. That's fine.... But there is a need to find out how and why Mr. Cheney got this one so wrong...

But Murray omits the most poisonous of Cheney's lies: his role in the campaign to deceive Americans into thinking that Saddam Hussein was closely allied with Al Qaeda and responsible in part for 911. It worked: 62% of Republicans believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 911 attacks. Cheney would also need to explain why he has involved himself in this campaign of deception.

Now Cheney won't answer any of these questions--we all know that--no matter how politely Alan Murray asks. Can we therefore expect Alan Murray to pull the lever for John Kerry and John Edwards come November?

A New Marshall Plan: Shrill

Marshall Wittmann, who served as Senator McCain's Director of Communications after stints at the Heritage Foundation and the Christian Coalition, is shrill:

Everything could have changed in the aftermath of 9/11. For a while it appeared that it had. Bush displayed moral clarity and leadership worthy of national greatness. However, it was short-lived. It turned out that Bush would be more of a Tom DeLay than a Winston Churchill. On the domestic political front, there was a brief interregnum of national unity. Bush rhetorically sought to bring together the nation in the fight against the terrorist enemy. However, it was soon clear that no political imagination would be employed to forge a new politics. Rather than challenging Americans to enlist in national service, the administration told them to "go shopping." Rather than asking more of those who have more, the administration refused to explore a progressive way to finance the war against terror. In fact, before long, the president returned to his mantra of permanent elimination of the "death tax." Yes, Virginia, there is a war going on, but the donors must be reimbursed!

Bush wisely initiated the overthrow of the Taliban and the liberation of Afghanistan. But as Kerry and others have pointed out, the Rumsfeld Pentagon pursued liberation on the cheap and did not aggressively pursue Osama bin Laden and the remnants of the Taliban in the battle of Tora Bora. As a result of the failure to devote sufficient resources to secure the peace in Afghanistan, that country's future is uncertain.

As the 2002 election approached, Bush had a choice. He could have valued national unity over partisan gain. He could have opted for national greatness over political cravenness. Instead, he chose to conduct a cynical and unprincipled campaign that harkened back to the 2000 South Carolina primary and consequently divided the country. After first opposing the Department of Homeland Security, he reversed course by supporting it and brandishing the proposal as a weapon against Democrats who opposed a minor labor provision. Then there is the story of triple-amputee Vietnam veteran Max Cleland, the U.S. senator from Georgia who was portrayed by the Georgia Republicans as soft on terrorism and a veritable Osama lover for his position on this labor provision. Once again, Ralph Reed -- now chairman of the Georgia Republican Party -- was at the scene of a political crime, taking out a war hero so Republican money power could be safe and secure. Praise the Lord, indeed!

The net result of the 2002 campaign was that the GOP was back in control of the Senate, and the united red, white, and blue country had returned to the divided red and blue states.

I had long supported regime change in Iraq. Saddam's threat to regional stability and the prospect that he would obtain weapons of mass destruction, along with his massive human rights violations, argued that he be removed, particularly after 9/11. But what I could not have anticipated was the Bush administration's abysmal incompetence in both the timing of the war and the execution of a post-war plan.

Ya na kadishtu nilgh'ri stell'bsna Wittmann,
K'yarnak phlegethor l'ebumna syha'h n'ghft,
Ya hai kadishtu ep r'luh-eeh Wittmann eeh,
S'uhn-ngh athg li'hee orr'e syha'h.

Things Humans Were Not Meant to See, Part LXII: Cokie Roberts Playing the "Liberal"

Matthew Yglesias made the mistake of watching Cokie Roberts play the "liberal" on TV. The former mild-mannered bespectacled Harvard moderate who spent his bright college years mocking the sillinesses of the Cantabrigian left and listening through his dorm room's fire door while his neighbor... Let's not go there--ed. What followed was not pretty. Trained paranormal paramedical professionals had to be called in to mop up the ichor.

I guess we must add "Cokie Roberts playing the 'liberal' on TV" to the list of "Things Humans Were Not Meant to See":

American Prospect Online - ViewWeb: On ABC’s This Week on Sunday morning, Cokie Roberts -- evidently the “liberal” on the panel, since neither George Will, David Brooks, nor Fareed Zakaria fit the bill... explained tha... “what George Bush said was fine.” Evidently, Roberts was watching with the sound off, and just decided this would be an intelligent-sounding thing to say. Even Will was driven to remark, “I’m not so sure”....

Was it really fine? Was it fine when Bush petulantly accused Kerry of forgetting about Poland when listing the countries that had participated in “major combat operations” in Iraq based on Poland’s contribution of a token force of 60 combat troops? Was he not paying attention during the war he ordered?

Maybe the fine part was Bush’s explanation that he “understand[s] how hard it is to commit troops.” After all, Bush “never wanted to commit troops.” As he explained, “when I was running -- when we had the debate in 2000, never dreamt I’d be doing that.” Never? The most charitable explanation is that the president was being overly literal and also has some kind of sleeping disorder where he never dreams. Less charitably, maybe he was just lying. Faced with the reality that he has, in fact, committed troops in a careless and irresponsible manner, he now feels the need to pretend that he understands why you shouldn’t do this. Least charitably of all, maybe the president meant what he said and he actually ran for president despite a total lack of understanding the job. Every president since Herbert Hoover -- at a minimum has committed troops somewhere or other. Every president in American history (except, perhaps, the unfortunate William Henry Harrison) has at least needed to seriously consider deploying troops. It’s sort of an important part of the job. But maybe on the same planet where substance doesn’t matter, it’s fine, substantively, for a presidential candidate to seriously misjudge the probability of war or just make things up.

Was it fine when the president said that “nearly 100,000 fully trained and equipped Iraqi soldiers, police officers, and other security personnel are working today?” Maybe what Cokie meant is that there’s nothing wrong with those words. Certainly, they’re excellent words. I wish they were true -- it would be good for our country for them to be true. But as Reuters has reported, only 22,700 have enough training to be “minimally effective at their tasks.”...

My personal candidate for least-fine thing Bush said, though, is that the reason we shouldn’t have bilateral talks with North Korea is that that’s “precisely what Kim Jong Il wants.” Now unlike the president, I’ve never gone to business school. My understanding, though, is that the concept of “negotiation” would probably show up there, so I don’t really know why the president doesn’t understand this. But the idea of a negotiation is that you give the other guy what he wants, and in exchange he gives you what you want. In particular, if we want Kim Jong Il to give up his nuclear weapons, we’re going to have to give him something he wants. That’s the way it works.

The president, evidently, is opposed to giving bad men things that they want to have. It’s understandable, in a way. Bad men are, after all, bad, and giving people what they want makes them happy, and who likes to see a newly happy bad man walking around smiling? Not me. But then again, I also don’t like the prospect of rogue states acquiring nuclear weapons and I don’t want our overstretched military to need to fight another war. That means negotiating. Giving people what they want. The president, apparently, has other plans. Four more years will mean either more wars, more nuclear proliferation, or some combination of the two. It isn’t fine.

TAPPED's Mark Goldberg Is Shrill

An unfortunate interaction between the rays of the dead, uncaring moon and the incompetence, malevolence, mendacity, and disconnection from reality of the Bush administration have turned TAPPED's Mark Goldberg into a monster: half-man, half-wolf, half-tentacled octopus, he prowls the swamps by night searching for his prey. His keen wolf-nose catches the spoor of Donald Rumsfeld, and so TAPPED's Mark Goldberg JOINS THE SHRILL!!!

TAPPED: October 2004 Archives: RUMSFELD LIES, PEOPLE DIE. Buried in MSNBC’s piece on Paul Bremer's recent troop level denunciations one finds this little nugget from Donald Rumsfeld.

During the war, concerns about troop strength expressed by retired generals also provoked angry denunciations by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld…In April 2003, for example, Rumsfeld commented, "People were saying that the plan was terrible and there weren't enough people and ... there were going to be, you know, tens of thousands of casualties, and it was going to take forever."

With over 17,000 casualties, 1,000 deaths, and no end in sight, it's time for some of the "people" who got it right to be put in charge.

Senator Chafee Ponders the Party of Lincoln

Senator Lincoln Chafee is considering joining the order:

"I'll vote Republican," he said, explaining that he would choose a write-in candidate, perhaps George Bush the elder, as a symbolic act of protest.

An anonymous White House spokesperson did not add, "STFU".

Paul Bremer Is Shrill!

Bat-Winged Horror Belle Waring reports that former Iraqi Proconsul Paul Bremer is shrill: "We never had enough troops on the ground," he says:

Crooked Timber: Paul Bremer: From the Washington Post: “Bremer Criticizes Troop Levels”. Maybe we should just start making lists of people who are well-informed about economics, the situation in Iraq, civil liberties, etc. and aren’t shrill. It would save the Shrillblog time.

The former U.S. official who governed Iraq after the invasion said yesterday that the United States made two major mistakes: not deploying enough troops in Iraq and then not containing the violence and looting immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government until the handover of political power on June 28, said he still supports the decision to intervene in Iraq but said a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on. “We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness,” he said yesterday in a speech at an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. “We never had enough troops on the ground.”

Now, though, Karl Rove has his balls in a vise everything is fine: “I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq,” he said in an e-mailed statement. He said all references in recent speeches to troop levels related to the situation when he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003. He added “please don’t hurt my family, Karl” that he “strongly supports” President Bush’s reelection.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is One of Us

Former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz dons the cuffs of the order and starts doing that slightly odd dance previously only seen at riotous weddings:

Bush supporters rightly ask: is Bush really to blame for this? Wasn't the recession already beginning when he took office?

The resounding answer is that Bush is to blame. Every president inherits a legacy. The economy was entering a downturn when Bush took office, but Clinton also left a huge budget surplus—2 percent of GDP—a pot of money with which to finance a robust recovery. But Bush squandered that surplus, converting it into a deficit of 5 percent of GDP through tax cuts for the rich.

The productivity growth that was sustained through the downturn presented both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity: If the economy was well managed, the incomes of Americans could continue to rise as they had done in the 1990s. The challenge: to manage the economy so that growth would be robust enough to create the new jobs required by new entrants to the labor force. Bush failed the challenge, and America lost the opportunity because of his wrong choices.

Oh, but he isn't the only one:

At the end of August, I joined nine other American Nobel Prize winners in economics in signing an open letter to the American public. It is hard to get any two economists—let alone two Nobel Prize winners—to agree on anything. But in this case our concerns were so grave as to overcome any disagreements.

We wrote: "President Bush and his administration have embarked on a reckless and extreme course that endangers the long-term economic health of our nation…. The differences between President Bush and John Kerry with respect to leadership on the economy are wider than in any other Presidential election in our experience. President Bush believes that tax cuts benefiting the most wealthy Americans are the answer to almost every economic problem."

Anyone have a source on that last bit? Until then, we say:

Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Stiglitz R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii

Memorandum of Understanding

From: The Mail Room
To: Office of Online Relations
Re: We're buried

Please let everyone know that we appreciate their enthusiastic response but are currently buried under a large pile of mail. In fact, the enthusiastic response is exactly why we're buried. We're gLad that gMail gAve us a gIgabyte of storage. We'll get back to everyone, but it may take a while. Please send a shovel.

Noah Schachtman Is Shrill!

The formerly level-headed and technocratic Noah Schachtman of DefenseTech is driven into shrill unholy madness by Cheney's and Rice's lies about aluminum tubes and Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons:

Defense Tech: NYT: During the lead up to the Iraq invasion, Condi Rice and other senior members of the Bush Administration didn't just pass along bad intelligence about Saddam's nuclear program. They hyped it up, knowing the case was wobbly, at best. The New York Times has the goods:

In a speech to veterans that August, Vice President Dick Cheney said Mr. Hussein could have an atomic bomb "fairly soon." The next month, Mr. Cheney told a group of Wyoming Republicans the United States had "irrefutable evidence" - thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States.

The tubes quickly became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, asserted on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Before Ms. Rice made those remarks, though, she was aware that the government's foremost nuclear experts had concluded that the tubes were most likely not for nuclear weapons at all, an examination by The New York Times has found. Months before, her staff had been told that these experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were probably intended for small artillery rockets.

The Anonymice in the White House Are Shrill

CJR Campaign Desk modems in:

CJR Campaign Desk: Archives: From the Saturday Times...: "... one prominent advisor who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of appearing critical of the president." Also Saturday...: "One veteran Republican strategist who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of offending the White House ..."... Sunday's paper...:... "An administration official, speaking anonymously because he also did not want to be identified as critical of Mr. Bush's debate performance ..."

Head Cyber Libertarian and Grateful Dead Lyricist John Perry Barlow Is Shrill

Here's what John Perry Barlow says, as somewhere over the North Atlantic he looks upward at the dead, uncaring stars, and contemplates the reality that is George W. Bush:

BarlowFriendz: I'm aloft somewhere between Rome and Cincinnati, jetting back towards my crazed, stupefied, dangerous country after three days in Berlin. I dread coming home. You know things have taken a paradoxical turn when Germany feels safe, sane, and free by comparison with the United States of America. But that's how it looks to me.

That's how it looks to the Germans too. The idea that we might actually re-elect George Bush is unfathomable - indeed, inexcusable - to them. As one of them put it to me, "We can forgive you for electing him once. As we ought to know, any electorate can make a tragic mistake. But if you elect him twice, we will start fearing you Americans as much as we currently fear your government." I suspect this is a sentiment one could encounter almost anywhere on God's blue earth. If the election were global as, in fairness, it probably ought to be, it would be a pulverizing landslide....

Right here, right now, somewhere over the Atlantic, I'm having a moment of clarity. I realize the obvious. I realize that, along with a lot of other people, I have fallen prey to the peculiar American frailty which has given us so many bad presidents. I refer to our national tendency to treat presidential elections as though we were all high-schoolers choosing a Prom King.

Thus, when it comes to qualifying for the American Presidency, a grating accent can be a bigger political liability than a record of homicidally misguided policies. Being inconsistent is a greater personal failing than being consistently, doggedly, disastrously wrong. Being dorky is more damning than being dictatorial.

We all need to get a grip and quickly. Whatever it has been traditionally, this Presidential race should not be a personality contest. I say this as much to myself to myself as I do to you. I have to snap out of it and remember we are not electing our new best friend here. We were electing a set of ideologies, cultural predispositions, policies, practices, and beliefs - many of them religious - that may literally affect the fate of life on earth. And one thing I will say for George Bush, he has disabused me of my old belief that it doesn't really matter who's President.

That's because George Bush was and is a package deal. Along with the man himself, whatever his personality traits, we got a large cast of characters who, in aggregate, have been vastly more important than the hands-off President himself. We got Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice. We got Ashcroft to a fare-the-well. We got Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle. And, boy, did we ever get Karl Rove.

We got a legion of too-smart-by-half Stepford husbands with flags on their lapels, fire in their eyes, and God on their side. We got pharmaceutical companies designing our health care systems, the prison-industrial complex designing our sentencing schedules, Exxon and Enron designing energy policy, Halliburton and the Carlyle Group and the Center for the New American Century designing foreign policy, Louisiana-Pacific designing forestry policy, and Con-Agra designing agricultural policy. We got the super-rich and multinationals designing tax policy to their personal benefit, creationists designing school curricula, fundamentalists designing scientific research agenda.

However one feels about the shapes of either John Kerry's jawline or his vowels, what matters most is the shape of what he would bring with him to the White House. His masters, his servants, and his fundamental beliefs will all be very different, whatever his marketing wizards (all of whom study Rove) are telling him to say now.

More to the point, terrible things have happened during the last four years that should not be rewarded no matter how we feel about John Kerry. The war in Iraq alone is unforgivable. While it would be a wonderful thing to have a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, it is criminally misguided to think that we could bomb such a thing into existence. And while it has become a mandatory cliche to say that the world is safer without Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq, I wouldn't even say this appears true at present.

Between his ill-conceived military adventures and the billions his tax cuts have diverted into the pockets of his friends, Bush has created a deficit that may ultimately bring down the world's economy. He has started the United States on a path towards oligarchy that, unchecked, could turn America into a country that makes Mexico look like Sweden. He is responding to the foreseeable exhaustion of the world's oil reserves with policies that burn them faster. And as nearly unprecedented hurricanes whip out of the warming Caribbean, he has continued to be the primary obstacle to a collective human response to galloping carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere. He has taken a good shot at gutting the Bill of Rights, and, with regard to Moslems, he has largely succeeded.

I won't attempt to repeat the list of his catastrophes here. It's far too long, and much of it has been enumerated on the Internet already. We all know it, and yet we continue to occupy ourselves with such airy trivialities as which candidate looks most "presidential." And against this backdrop of Bush-driven national emergencies, I've been allowing John Kerry's accent to diminish my sense of commitment to his election,

I can't do this any more. Neither can the rest of us who have any regard for the well-being of our descendents.

Yeah, John Kerry makes a lousy candidate for Prom King. But that isn't what he's running for.

Aaaaiiii! Ya hai kadishtu ep r'luh-eeh a friend of the devil is a friend of mine. Aaaaiiii!

Barry Ritholtz and Kate O'Beirne Join the Shrill

Barry Ritholtz watches Meet the Press and finds National Review's Kate O'Beirne saying that George W. Bush is like an inept sultan surrounded by flatterers, toadies, and evil viziers:

The Blogging of the President: 2004: National Review’s Washington Editor Kate O'Beirne had a fascinating comment this morning on Meet The Press this morning:

“I wonder if its much easier -- or less intimidating -- to prepare a Senator for a debate -- where you can say “Gee, that answer is lame, Senator” -- than it is a sitting President, where there aren’t a lot of people in the room who are willing to say -- “that answer doesn’t work, Mr. President.”

O'Beirne’s comments were rather telling; They go along way on explaining some of the more puzzling behavior of this administration.

Think about this: If hardly anyone is willing to challenge the President of the United States of America when he gives a ‘lamo answer in debate practice,’ fer cryin out loud, riddle me this, Batman: Who the hell is challenging him when he gets basic facts about the world wrong? Does she mean to tell me that the Presdient is surrounded by “Yes Men,” people who do not provoke, challenge or even play “devil’s advocate” with him on major policy discussions?

I suspect its even worse than that: The President has been in a bubble, with minimal contact with challenging questioners. Recall the Irish journalist who had the temerity to ask follow up questions to the President’s aphorisms and soundbites. The White House cancelled a pre-scheduled interview with the First Lady as payback for asking tough questions.

At BC04 rallies, attendees sign loyalty oaths. James Wolcott wrote that Bush has only “been wheeled out into forums where no one can dare question or contradict his majesty, where he can lean forward and repeat ad nauseam his patented soundbites”

Now, the repercussions of these kid gloves are being felt. Over the course of 12 months of swinging at only lobs from hand chosen questioners, the President forgot what real questions are like. The debate reminds me of a heavyweight fighter, training for a major bout: If you skip on doing real sparring for a long time, when the actual fight starts, the first blow from your opponent can really ring your bell.

I think that’s what happened in the first debate.

O'Beirne's remark speaks volumes about the courage and character of those who have signed up to work in George W. Bush's White House. And so even in the offices of National Review the cry is raised: Ya hai kadishtu ep r'luh-eeh Bush eeh, S'uhn-Cheney athg li'hee orr'e syha'h!

Andrew Sullivan Says David Brooks Is Shrill

Andrew Sullivan writes:

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: If you read between the lines, you'll discover [that David Brooks agrees with] what is, in fact, the private consensus of many conservatives who are publicly supporting Bush: that the president's heart is in the right place but he has a tenuous grasp of the instruments of government and how to wield them.

Is Sullivan correct? Does Brooks, in the privacy of his own home, rave shrilly about how George W. Bush is incompetent to be president before opening the secret panel in his library wall that leads to the hidden crypt where he bows down to the Elder Shrill before shrieking: Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii!?

As Bob Woodward once claimed somebody had said, it's a slam dunk!

Tom Friedman Is Shrill

Crouched on all fours like some savage, maddened beast, ululating psychotically at the uncaring stars, at long last--in spite of every attempt to retain his sanity by truckling to and licking the boots of the Bush administration--Tom Friedman is shrill!

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Iraq: Politics or Policy?: We're in trouble in Iraq. I don't know what is salvageable there anymore.... This war has been hugely mismanaged by this administration, in the face of clear advice to the contrary at every stage, and as a result the range of decent outcomes in Iraq has been narrowed and the tools we have to bring even those about are more limited than ever....

The Bush team got its doctrines mixed up: it applied the Powell Doctrine to the campaign against John Kerry.... If only the Bush team had gone after the remnants of Saddam's army in the Sunni Triangle with the brutal efficiency it has gone after Senator Kerry in the Iowa-Ohio-Michigan triangle.... [T]hey applied the Rumsfeld Doctrine in the Middle East.... "Just enough troops to lose."...

For all of President Bush's vaunted talk about being consistent and resolute, the fact is he never established U.S. authority in Iraq. Never. This has been the source of all our troubles. We have never controlled all the borders, we have never even consistently controlled the road from Baghdad airport into town, because we never had enough troops to do it.... [T]his Bush team can't get us there, and may have so messed things up that no one can. Why? Because each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and ideology. More troops or radically lower taxes? Lower taxes. Fire an evangelical Christian U.S. general who smears Islam in a speech while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army or not fire him so as not to anger the Christian right? Don't fire him. Apologize to the U.N. for not finding the W.M.D., and then make the case for why our allies should still join us in Iraq to establish a decent government there? Don't apologize - for anything - because Karl Rove says the "base" won't like it. Impose a "Patriot Tax" of 50 cents a gallon on gasoline to help pay for the war, shrink the deficit and reduce the amount of oil we consume so we send less money to Saudi Arabia? Never. Just tell Americans to go on guzzling. Fire the secretary of defense for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, to show the world how seriously we take this outrage - or do nothing? Do nothing. Firing Mr. Rumsfeld might upset conservatives. Listen to the C.I.A.? Only when it can confirm your ideology. When it disagrees - impugn it or ignore it....

If only Friedman had been shrill a year and a half ago--had said then that it was madness to attack Iraq without 150,000 reliable Arabic-speaking MPs in our tail!

A Note On Clerical Errors In The Processing Department

Some thoughtful readers have pointed out that it should not have been possible for George W. Bush to have joined the Order that is "limited to those who were once sane, fair, and balanced, but who have been driven into shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration." (See Brother Brad's helpful column.) It would seem prima facie to be impossible.

Hey, we Brothers and Sisters at the processing division are mortified by our mistake. But look at it from our side: there are hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of people named George Bush in America. What are the odds that this Bush would be the one splitting his time equally between DC and Crawford? (Our forms do not require your home address. Members are Hermetic and like to keep their whereabouts on the QT.)

Please stop bugging us! It was an honest mistake! Hey, if Teddy Kennedy can get repeatedly mistaken for a terrorist then perhaps you can understand how this small clerical error might have happened.

But it raises an important theoretical question: what if George W. Bush has been driven into shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration? Is it possible that his inner child is beginning to openly clash with his outer child? Are the soothing tones of Dick Cheney's voice beginning to lose their hypnotic effect? Can the bad cop/worse cop act of Cheney and Rove be wearing thin? Or perhaps the sharp intellect honed by years of collegiate study is collapsing under the unbearable strain of endless doublespeak?

Or it might have just been a damn clerical error. Stop pouring salt in the wound! We're humiliated, okay?

I'm Sorry, Exactly Who Just Joined The Order?

Shrillblog enters the twilight zone as Bush gets shrill on the subject of un-democratic government:

No, I don't think it's OK, and said so publicly. I think that there needs to be checks and balances in a democracy, and made that very clear that by consolidating power in the central government, [Russian President Vladimir Putin is] sending a signal to the Western world and United States that perhaps he doesn't believe in checks and balances, and I told him that.

I look forward to discussing it more with him, as time goes on. Russia is a country in transition. Vladimir is going to have to make some hard choices. And I think it's very important for the American president, as well as other Western leaders, to remind him of the great benefits of democracy, that democracy will best help the people realize their hopes and aspirations and dreams.

We're expecting Bush to immediately launch a barnstorming tour of Russia with stump speeches on pervasive and secret government surveillance, indefinite incarceration without charges, secret courts, sentences without appeal, torture, and political intimidation.

Editor's note: Bush's application to the order was accidentally processed but subsequently rejected when the obvious error was discovered. We apologize to Mr. Bush for raising his hopes only to dash them--but rules are rules and we here at the processing division of The Order have to abide by the edicts set forth since time immemorial. You don't get to be a venerable organization steeped in ancient tradition by letting things slide even a little bit. We feel sure that he understands, but we ask that he please accept our deepest regrets. We now return to your regularly scheduled impenetrable Lovecraftian incantations.